Would God ever allow time travel. This is an interesting question. In order to answer it we have to try and look at time from God's perspective which is not an easy thing to do.
In 2 Peter 3:8 it says "But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." (KJV)
Time means nothing to God. He is outside of time. Try to picture the entire history of the world from beginning to end as a drawn time-line. It starts with Gods creation of the world, and ends with Gods destruction of the world. You can see Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses and all the rest. You can see what they did...or didn't do. Our limitation is that we can only see what is past and of that not much. Pretend you can see everything that has already happened. God is the beginning and the end "the Alpha and Omega". He has already seen all of Human history, so he can "look back" in this same way and see what to us is unknown future.
Now let's come back to the original question, would God ever allow time travel. No, because he alone can view the entire span of human existence. He alone can see the future as if it were past. That is part of what makes him God. He will not allow a human to mess with the space-time continuum for the same reason I won't let my kids touch the stove...all we would do is screw it up and hurt ourselves.
Now that we are aware of how God sees time, lets take that a step further...
Ephesians 1:4-6 "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestined us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved" (KJV)
God knew from the beginning of the world everything that would happen and has already guided it to it's conclusion.
What is the implication? There is no such thing as "time". "Time" is an artificial construct to describe the situation humans find themselves in vis-a-vis our physical world. To God, who is not retarded by the artificial construct of time, the future has already happened...which means there is also no such thing as change. Think about that for a moment. There is no such thing as "change".
I don't know about you, but I find comfort in the fact that God is "timeless" and "changeless", and if something in History needs fixing, I'll leave the time travel to him anyway.
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4 comments:
Gordo, pleased to make your acquaintance.
Re:your post on time travel question I'd like for you to expand on what you stated as you don't think there is not really itme dimension and that it is an artificial man construct. If you reallysay that, I begg to differ because it that is true, than there really isn't this universe and we are living in and it our existence is an illusion.
I'd like to suggest, Brian Greene's book The Fabric of the Cosmos - to me it is a commentary on Hebrews 11:3 (see his interview he gave to the now defunct Mars Hill Forum - I have a .pdf you'd like me to e-mail to you) as well as a translation of the language the the nightly sky speak in Psalm 19: 1-4.
I love your C.S. Lewis quote and I have a few such books; D. Willard's Divine Conspiracy; The Faces of Forgiveness; N.T. Wright's Paul; Miroslav Volfe's Embrace & Exclusion; G. MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons.
Carlos
Gordo,
Forgot to add that Hugh Ross in his Beyound the Cosmos book does a wonderfull job on the extra dimensions required to solve Eistein's relativity laws and states that God may have multiple time dimensions at His dispoosal - his description of a spherical time dimension available to God is what enables Him to know instanteneously the begining of all things and the end - check it out as it provides an elegant solution to the predestination queston w/o us having to succumb to Calvinism/Determinism but gives a tennable argument in support of choice/free will - I still think God is the epitome of a Gentlemen (Lady if you prefer); while He is outside of any dimensions, we humans unfortunately are not - incidently for there to be no change, you'd have to move at the speed of light; we are no where near this capabibility presently.
BTW and FYI, it is speculated that God may have 26 dimensions at His disposal - the number that the TETRAGRAMOTON (YAWEH) denotes.
I don't neccisarily think that God wouldn't allow for time travel and here's why. I don't think God would allow us to change anything but thats ok because time travel into the past would be impossible anyway due to creating a time paradox and therefore impossible. Also once you traveled to the future you wouldn't be able to travel back to the present. But time travel into the future is theoretically possible in science, and i see no reason why God wouldn't allow it, because he allows to travel forward in time right now, one second at a time doesn't he? why not a million years into the future? we would have as much influence on things as we do now, unless you believe in predestination where god makes all your choices for you. i personally believe in free will, and i don't think god would have any problem with travel to the future.
A have a friend. She is 19, and has the most beautiful smile in the world. She just smiles to everyone and is a wonderful person. She helps everyone and her smile really makes life worth living.
She died a few months ago. She was 19.
God watched her die. He sees everything. God didnt stop her death, even though it would benefit the world if she were still alive. geeze even I deserve to die more than her.
God didnt save her cause of free-will. which is his greatest gift to us. She had free will, freedom. But so did her murderer. And God respects it, no matter what.
I wish I could go back in time, and change that night where she died... Though I think god wouldn't let me. He would probably be waiting for me at the very spot my friend died, and stop me somehow from intervening: for free-will has to be respected, and her death cannot be prevented. Because if it were prevented, many things would alter in the future... for many people (the butterfly effect), and thus limiting the free-will those people had to a free-will with certain properties I implemented.
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